France Continues Fighting From North Africa? Pro-West Korea But PRC Taiwan?

Still checking on the public forums of the Internet's premiere alternate history site despite having been self-banned from posting for several years at this point. Here are some of the most interesting recent offerings.

Essai En Guerre: An FFO-Inspired TL-"France Fights On" is one of the more well-known scenarios in the online AH subculture, albeit more so in France than in the Anglosphere. It diverges from our history when the suspiciously pro-Axis mistress of French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud dies in a traffic accident. This tiny change leads to a Reynaud more willing to exert himself to continue fighting Germany from the colonies even if it means disengaging from the losing battle on the mainland. As a result, the French evacuating much of its military to North Africa and continuing the war from there rather than having Marshal Petain get a cease-fire and set up the puppet Vichy regime. Here's a YouTube video breaking the first part of the main timeline down and here is an in-progress English translation. This version, though it has a lot in common with the main FFO scenario, has some unique spins. It's definitely a worse world for the Axis on top of the additional losses the Germans took having to fight for the entirety of European France--the Italians get their stuffing wrecked in Africa well before they did in real life and the French, reequipped with gear they'd ordered from the US that didn't arrive in time to help them fight the Germans, contribute enough for (most of) mainland Greece to hold against the Germans and their various cronies in the Balkans.

(Not as crazy as it sounds--Hitler's strategic priority at this point was attacking the Soviet Union for "living space," so leaving the Allies with a toehold in mainland Europe that they now have to feed is plausible. He was pretty overconfident about defeating the "subhuman" Russians, so him thinking he can deal with Britain, the French die-hards, and that little bit of Greece after the Soviets are destroyed isn't that much different than his real-life view he could deal with Britain once the Soviets were destroyed.)

Pro-Western United Korea, PRC-Controlled Taiwan-This timeline has two different scenarios, not just one. In the first, the Red Chinese finish off the Nationalists in Hainan Island more quickly than in real history, allowing them to attack the Nationalist remnant in Taiwan before the U.S. can organize the Seventh Fleet to defend them. This keeps them too busy to intervene in Korea to keep North Korea from getting obliterated. In the second version, the Chinese don't intervene in the Korean War, leading the U.S. to withdraw the Seventh Fleet--and after a sufficiently-decent interval the Chinese pounce on Taiwan. Either way, this world is spared the horrors of the Kim Dynasty, but the Chinese Communists have a direct outlet on the Pacific. That in turn will have its affects on U.S. possessions and allies in the region, like Okinawa and the Philippines.

Lions Will Fight Bears: Britain In WWIII

I still check on the alternate history forum for interesting stories even though I'm still self-banned (and intend to stay that way). Most recently I checked out the section dedicated to finished timelines (content only, no reader comments like in the main forums) and found the scenario Lions Will Fight Bears: Britain In WWIII. The gist of it is that the hard-liner coup against Mikhail Gorbachev happens in 1988 rather than 1991 and rather than causing the Soviet Union to collapse as it did in our history, it imposes an unstable regime that soon goes completely paranoid and launches an attack on NATO thinking that NATO is going to attack them. Although the conflict only lasts a month or so and no nuclear weapons are used, it's still a pretty ugly situation, especially if you're a West German or a Dane.

I don't know the author, but he (when I was there the forum was very male-dominated) seems to know quite a lot about British politics and his focus is on the British, although obviously there's plenty about the US and Soviet Union too. And there's a lot of stuff in here I haven't read in the WWIII fiction I'm familiar with like The Third World War, Red Army, or Red Storm Rising.

*Something I'd never read before in WWIII fiction but should have been more obvious based on what happened with the COVID lockdowns is how disruptive war preparations would be to the societies in question even before the shooting starts. The author devotes several chapters to the problems the "transition to war" process causes the British public, problems that escalate into armed confrontations between cranky British civilians and American soldiers and even rioting due to transportation restrictions, business and school closures, etc.

*It was my understanding the British had lists of people to intern in the event of WWIII, which I assumed were people like British Communists who would be security risks. However, just who is on this list and why becomes a major issue.

*Also a 1988 WWIII is in the middle of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Not only did the Soviets support various factions of the IRA (which is, unbeknownst to enthusiastic Americans of Irish background in Boston, a Communist organization), but part of their pre-war destabilizing plan involves encouraging them to attack British and Loyalist forces more aggressively. This includes, among other things, killing future UK Prime Minister John Major. Between that, the stuff I referenced above, and the fact that most of the British military is fighting the Soviets, Northern Ireland collapses into civil war. And it gets ugly--Nationalist and Loyalist paramilitary groups routinely commit crimes against civilians from rival communities and it escalates into open ethnic cleansing, with the understrength British Army unable to do much to stop it. Prominent republican Gerry Adams ends up being tortured to death by Loyalist paramilitaries, for example.

*The scenario also includes Soviet attacks on the United States itself even though the war stays conventional--Soviet bombers operating from occupied parts of Scandinavia and even the Soviet mainland and Soviet naval forces are able to strike New England, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. Soviet and Cuban forces raid the Florida Keys and even Florida itself. Usually in WWIII fiction the war doesn't come to the American homeland until the nukes start going off (think the film The Day After, in which there's fighting in Europe that soon leads to strategic nuclear use, or the novel Alas Babylon where the fighting starts in the Middle East). However, given the ranges of Soviet aircraft, the fact Soviet submarines and long-range aircraft would be equipped with cruise missiles, etc. that makes a lot of sense.

(In one of the "SDI Punk" blog posts, author Ken Prescott makes the point that cruise missiles made virtually every US Navy ship a potential threat to the Soviet homeland and thus the Soviets would need to hunt down all ships, not just the carriers and submarines carrying nuclear missiles. There's really no reason the Soviets couldn't do the same. And given the US's open society, it'd be a lot easier to infiltrate spies, commandoes, etc. in the fashion of the television series The Americans than the reverse.)

*And then there's the fun the KGB and other secret-police organizations get up to in occupied areas. Americans generally don't have to live with the concern that they'll be targeted on an individual level by an occupying army, but I imagine that was a very real concern for Europeans on the frontlines of the Cold War. It would be very easy for Soviet agents in open societies like West Germany, Sweden, Norway, etc. to assemble lists of people to arrest or kill in the event of Soviet occupation--local businessmen, politicians, clergy, retired soldiers, etc.

(The third of S.M. Stirling's Draka novels features American soldiers deploying into fallback positions in the Appalachians right before the balloon goes up. It's made explicit they've been erased from military records to forestall exactly that.)

In particular, American General John Shalikashvili--born in Poland and viewed by the Communist Poles as a traitor and son of a traitor despite becoming a U.S. citizen as a child--finds this out the hard way. And at a macro level there's the Nightmare Fuel of what the East Germans soldiers do in occupied West Germany, which they intend to absorb into a united Communist Germany. We're talking mass killings of captured military officers, removing books from libraries, civilians and captured enlisted men put to forced labor, etc.

*Speaking of him, since this is written well after the end of the Cold War and is intended to be faux history rather than an action thriller, we see a lot of real-life personalities. At the political level there's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and Vice-President George H.W. Bush, but there's also the British Michael Jackson (who prevented escalation between NATO and Russian forces in Kosovo in 1999 in real history), American Wesley Clark (who gave the orders in that situation), Colin Powell, and the victor of the Persian Gulf War Norman Schwarzkopf whom I remember being the great hero when I was a little kid.

The main problem I have with the scenario is that it's incredibly, incredibly detailed. We're talking beyond Clancy level in terms of descriptions of military movements, technology, etc. Although this reflects well on the author--he clearly knows his stuff--it's very dense and kind of a slog to read. Even though this sort of thing is ordinarily something I enjoy reading, I was skimming a lot. It took me three-odd days to finish reading the whole scenario.

FALLEN EMPIRE What Might Have Been #1: Choi and Watson

Awhile back, I wrote two Kindle Worlds novellas set in independent science fiction author Lindsay Buroker's Fallen Empire universe, "Ten Davids, Two Goliaths" and its sequel "Discovery and Flight."Both were part of a sub-series called "Choi and Watson" that took place during the rebellion preceding the events of the first novel Star Nomad. They followed Geun Choi, a Korean Buddhist warrior-mystic, and his friend Tammy Watson, a recovering drug addict. Both are fighter pilots for the rebellion that brought down the titular Empire and repeatedly cross paths with canonical characters like main-series protagonist Alisa Marchenko and her lecherous friend Bradford Tomich.

(Since neither character is part of the main series, this avoids the prequel problem of knowing a character's eventual fate. See this comment from Mad Magazine about the duel between Palpatine and Yoda in Revenge of the Sith. Since Choi and Watson aren't canon characters, it's entirely possible one or both of them could die in the events of a story and that allows for suspense.)

However, Amazon shut down Kindle Worlds not long after I started writing for it. Although Lindsay allowed those who'd written KW stories already to republish them ourselves, I didn't see any point in writing more. Here's where "Choi and Watson" would have gone if Kindle Worlds had kept going.

(I had some ideas for unrelated stories, but those will have to wait for a later blog post.)

"Torpedo Protocol" (Choi and Watson #3)-The Alliance unit that includes our heroes expended almost all of their torpedoes during the events of "Discovery and Flight," so the rebels have to steal more. While the mission is being planned, Tomich (who has had an eye on Watson since the beginning of "D&F" at least) finally sleeps with her, much to the protective Choi's irritation. To shut him up, Tomich tries to hook up Choi with one of his (many) previous flings, who's also a Buddhist. This one gets into the Empire's religious policies--in one of the later books, it's revealed the Empire required everybody to join the state religion centered on the three suns and exiled the die-hards of Earth's old faiths to a reservation planet. Choi's syncretic Buddhist faith was tolerated due to its similarity with the official religion, while Tomich's ex had to suffer for her more traditionalist beliefs and is surprisingly resentful of her date. And then the battle starts...

"Fire From The Sky" (Choi and Watson #4)-In the main series the rebels' Tri-Suns Alliance engaged in ruthless tactics like deliberately attacking civilians because they couldn't defeat the Empire in open combat, at least until very late in the game. In this story, we see this firsthand--after the Imperial admiral from "Discovery and Flight" bombards a rebellious planet from orbit, the Alliance uses captured civilian ships as relativistic weapons, devastating a loyalist planet in return. This causes the horrified Watson to break up with Tomich, who abandons his habit of poaching among the lower ranks to start sleeping up the chain of command, which we see throughout the main series. In his mind, Watson didn't want anything to do with him anymore because owing to her lower rank she's not aware of the "big picture," but someone higher on the totem pole would be.

Both of these novellas were plotted out when Kindle Worlds shut down, but I hadn't started writing them. I had some ideas for later novellas involving the characters stealing fighter spacecraft ("Stealing Strikers"), seeking to recover a psychic-amplification device referenced in one of the canonical prequels ("Psychic Fire"), and destroying a factory producing android soldiers for the Empire ("Android Rising"). The latter is particularly important because although sapient androids exist in this world, the Empire didn't mass-produce them to crush the rebellion. The point of this story would be to explain why.

Alternate History Scenario: A Secret German Atomic Bomb?

Here's the latest interesting scenario from the alternate history forum--what if Germany had a secret nuclear arsenal? Given how anti-nuclear much of the German public is to the point they'll shut down nuclear plants and go back to coal, even if it means increasing carbon-dioxide emissions, and anti-military, plus the absolute fury that would result from countries Germany ravaged during World War II if this was discovered (the treaties that allowed German reunification renounce forever nuclear weapons, for starters) it seems unlikely. That said, democratic states can be swayed by popular opinion, but a dictatorship has much less reason to care.

So behold "Die Atombomben der Bundesrepublik: An Oral History of Germany's Nuclear Weapons Program," in which the new chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany learns that the reason the East German leadership was treated so leniently after the fall of the Wall is because they bequeathed a secret East German nuclear arsenal to the new united Germany. Unlike South Africa, the new leadership decided to keep said weapons rather than dismantle them. And given the drama that would result if this ever became public, only a few top military officials and the chancellor themselves are aware of this--the new chancellor receives a special one-hour briefing upon their ascension.

(That reminds me a lot of the reveal in I think Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that the Muggle Prime Minister is only informed of the existence of a secret magical society in Great Britain when they take office and it's a massive shock for them.)

The author has gone into a lot of detail about the suppression of the Prague Spring, the East German internal political situation, East Germany's infamous espionage apparatus, etc. It's a really interesting read.

A 1632 War Between the Spanish and Tokugawa Japan?

Although I'm self-banned from the alternate history forum to keep myself from wasting too much time online, I do drop in the public forums to check for interesting new material. Here's one new story, "Reconquista Basara: A 1632 Spanish-Tokugawa War TL."

It diverges from real history in 1632 when Matsakura Shigemasa, a strongly anti-Christian daimyo (Japanese feudal lord) escapes an assassination attempt that might have been ordered by the Shogun due to his misrule and brutalization of the peasantry. Per the Wikipedia article he was planning to launch a maritime invasion of the Spanish colony of Luzon in the Philippines!. Not being dead this time around, he's able to launch the campaign with the assistance of the Dutch, who would welcome the chance to open up another front against the Spanish and don't like the Jesuits much more than he does. Luzon falls, but the Spanish (and the Portuguese, with whom they were in a dynastic union at the time) strike back, landing an army in Japan proper and gaining  support from the Catholic peasants and ronin (masterless samurai), who in real history would soon launch the Shimabara Rebellion.

Some highlights of this timeline include:

*Early modern Japanese expansion outside of the Home Islands, which with the weakening Ming Dynasty in China and the relatively weak European presence elsewhere in Asia would have been something they'd have a strong chance at pulling off. Yes, they failed in real history to conquer Korea the first time, but Korea was a well-organized state backed up by Imperial China. The Philippines are farther away, but the Spanish and their local allies are far weaker on the ground. Although the Shogun knows there's going to be hell to pay for this, the other lords of Japan view Matsakura as a hero and Japan as whole is now in on this for reasons of saving face if nothing else. That in turn has consequences--see below.

*When the Iberians strike back, the Shogunate gets what is coming to it for its mistreatment of Japanese Christians and squeezing of the peasants more generally. Although I have a fairly high tolerance for movie violence, one film I'm not interested in seeing is Silence because based on the trailers it looks like a cavalcade of "Japanese Christians getting tortured and murdered by the Shogun." The near-genocide of Japanese Christians is proof that one can kill an idea (although "hidden Christians" survived here and there until the end of the Shogunate Christianity was effectively obliterated) and the fact that some idiotic modern people view this as some kind of anti-colonial campaign or an attempt to protect traditional Japanese religion from the Inquisition is even more galling. This time around Japanese Catholics might be on "the right side of history" and the Shoguns on the wrong, even though as a Christian I'm inclined to think Judgement Day will see the Church's ultimate vindication.

*This additional front in the worldwide war between the Spanish and the Dutch and the Protestants and Catholics in turn has some major effects in Europe. Although globalization is typically viewed as a modern phenomenon, even then the world was very interconnected--silver from the Americas funded Spain's wars against the Ottomans and Protestants and purchased luxury goods from Asia via the Manila galleon. I'm not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers.

The last update on the timeline was last Thursday, August 22. I hope the author keeps up the good work.

What If The Paris Commune Had Survived, Expanded...?

A couple weeks ago one of my church friends clued me into the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan, which has been going on for awhile and has episodes on the various intricacies of the American, French, Haitian, and Mexican revolutions and a lot of discussion of the different strains of Marxism and anarchism as they build toward the Russian Revolution. I haven't had a chance to listen to all of them yet, but over the last few weeks a lot of driving (especially during my trip to Hypericon--driving from Atlanta to Murfreesboro and back plus a jaunt from Murfreesboro to Nashville to see about getting my books in the city library) meant I could listen to all of the episodes about the Paris Commune. For those of you not in the know, it was a brief Communist-anarchist takeover of Paris that got gruesomely suppressed and the lessons learned from it were quite influential on the Communist revolution in Russia.

One of my big interests is alternate history and although I had myself banned from the premiere AH discussion forum online, I do check in now and then. I decided to see what I could find on the Paris Commune and found a full alternate timeline called "The Spectre of Europe" written by the user whose handle is Reydan. It diverges from real history when conservative politician Adolphe Thiers has a stroke just before the revolt breaks out, preventing him from playing the instrumental role he did in crushing it. As a consequence, the revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui isn't preemptively jailed and able to make it to Paris and provides the necessary leadership for the Commune to avoid being crushed, although they do have to make a deal with the Prussian devil to do it.

Highlights of the timeline include...

*The division of France into a very left-wing republic (seriously, most conservative parties are outlawed, although given certain recent circumstances I wouldn't blame them for worrying about the Bonapartists) and a restored monarchy. When said monarchy is defeated in a later war it goes into exile in France's North African colonies, which the monarchy retained when France was partitioned.

*William Jennings Bryan becomes the president of the United States.

*Reform and partition in China.

*One of Kaiser Wilhelm's character flaws is that he was, in addition to being an erratic blowhard, is that he had some very Yellow Peril ideas about the rise of China. Since our world's WWI doesn't happen, we get to see these tendencies flourish and the results are not pretty.

*The rise of a sort of militant agrarianism (in Scandinavia of all places) as an analogue to our timeline's fascism.

The timeline is so popular that it even has a TVTropes page. I would definitely recommend checking it out. Also, don't forget to check out The Revolutions podcast or his History of Rome podcast, all of which are really interesting.

Irish in the Americas, Mexico and Guatemala Go To War, and French Protestant South Africa

More goodies from the alternate history forum. Although I've been self-banned from posting for the last three years--all the better to focus on my writing--I still go by every so often to see if there's something interesting.

And behold, here are some new alternate-history scenarios!

In this one, the seagoing Irish monk St. Brendan makes his way to what would become Canada (much like how the Vikings did later on) and kicks off Irish settlement of the New World many centuries in advance. A trans-Atlantic trade in exotic furs is enough to fund everything and we start seeing Britons fleeing the oncoming Saxons traveling across the seas as well as Irish. Although the Native Americans are still vulnerable to European diseases, the Irish settlement is on a much smaller scale and is much less organized, so they still have a fighting chance.

(Yes, I know it sounds absolutely insane, but someone actually built the kind of boat St. Brendan would have used and sailed to Canada from Ireland. Think Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Expedition to show the Polynesians could have traveled to South America or South Americans could have traveled to Polynesia.)

 And this discussion here features a war breaking out between Mexico and Guatemala in the late 1950s. I'm not really familiar with Latin American history from that period, but it seems plausible and well-researched. And in real life El Salvador and Honduras got into a shooting war over soccer, so it's not like wars in the region haven't been started over less.

Finally, here's a timeline I found the other day featuring French Protestants colonizing South Africa. I'm not familiar with the French Wars of Religion beyond some of the different noble houses involved and how the Protestants essentially won but their leader converted to Catholicism in order to actually govern, but it seems pretty legitimate and detailed. The Huguenots (French Protestants) seem generally more decent to the natives than the Boers were (hiring them as free laborers on their farms rather than enslaving them), so perhaps the region's racial history will be a bit more pleasant.

So if you're wondering how history could have gone differently and you want something a little more exotic than "what if the South won the Civil War" and "what if Hitler won WWII," come check these out. They're fun.

Prussian Generals In Austrian Service and a Tougher Italian Fight for Ethiopia

Awhile back I posted about an alternate timeline featuring our world's Frederick the Great defecting to Austria and having a major impact on world history (early ending of serfdom in Russia, earlier and larger American Revolution, and much more). It was a pretty good timeline and it's still going.

Well, here's another alternate timeline featuring a real-life Prussian general in Austrian service, "The Great Silent One: Moltke the Austrian." In this one, the Prussian military genius Moltke the Elder moves to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a child. Instead of serving on first the Prussian and then the German Imperial general staff, instead he enters the Hapsburg army and makes his way to their general staff instead. Nothing really significant differs from our world until the Austrians battle the French in the Sardinian War. Then things start getting really, really different. Highlights of the timeline include the humbling of Prussia, the continued survival of Napoleon III's regime in France (and its increasingly anti-British turn), a wiser Nicholas II of Russia influenced by his reformist grandfather and not his reactionary father, and French interfering in the Spanish-American War.

Things aren't looking good for the British as Europe seems to be developing an alternate-timeline version of the Three Emperor's League of Napoleonic France, the enlarged Hapsburg Empire, and Romanov Russia, but given how the French have annoyed the Americans already, it's possible an Anglo-American rapprochement will happen at around the same time.

Moving onward, there's another interesting timeline, "The New Conquering Lion of Judah, Ras Imru!" Ras Imru was a cousin of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and one of Ethiopia's most successful generals during the second Ethiopian-Italian war, at one point menacing the Italian rear before his army was wrecked by aerial bombardment using poison gas. Although many often think of the second war as being a one-sided beating of the Ethiopians by Mussolini and company, the Italians weren't doing too well early on. Heck, even later on the Ethiopians had the chance to inflict a major defeat on the Italians that they lost due to feasting before battle for a week.

(I'm MerryPrankster, although I haven't posted in years because the site--especially the political discussion forums--are time sinks.)

In this scenario, the timeline's author uses my suggested point of divergence that the Ethiopians attack the Italians at Maychew earlier and beat them. Despite winning the battle, the Ethiopians know they won't be able to defend the capital against the Italians once the rainy season ends, so they set up a provisional capital at Gore, more defensible against the Italians, and begin implementing long-run plans for a guerrilla war in areas under Italian occupation. The success at Maychew and Ethiopian diplomacy at the League of Nations convinces the League to end the arms embargo to "both sides" that benefited the somewhat-industrialized Italians (who could manufacture their own weapons) but kept the Ethiopians disarmed. Weapons ordered by the Ethiopians but impounded in other European colonies start flowing in, while foreign journalists have more freedom to cover the war (and thus publicize the Ethiopian cause).

In the last update the Ethiopians have abandoned the capital of Addis Ababa (with the exception of some stay-behinds who bushwhack Italian and Eritrean troops entering the city), but the war's not over yet...

AH Scenario: The U.S. Nukes Dresden...And Others

I'm still self-banned from the alternate-history forum I've been a member of since high school in order to focus on my day job and more important projects (like finishing my planned sequel to The Thing in the Woods), but I still visit the public sections fairly regularly. There's a relatively new scenario that might be of interest to World War II enthusiasts.

Behold "The Atomic Bombing of Germany, 1945." According to The Good War, an oral history of WWII that I read for AP U.S. History in high school, the atomic bomb was always intended for Germany, although the European war ended before it was ready. In this alternate timeline, the Trinity atomic bomb test takes place in 1944--how the bomb is ready a year earlier isn't discussed in detail, but a memoir by a Manhattan Project scientist on how it could have gone faster is cited--allowing for Germany to be targeted soon after the Battle of the Bulge.

Germany hasn't gotten nuked yet, but the B-29s are gathering in Britain and a lot of faux historical articles in the timeline indicate when the hammer is about to fall. Dresden is going to suffer its historical fate (albeit somewhat worse, if it suffers Hiroshima level casualties as opposed to the real-life ones), and a couple other German cities are on the target list.

I'm not going to apply for readmission to the site just to post on this (and probably get sucked into endless discussions about Star Wars, Donald Trump, etc. in other sections of the forum), so I hope it gets updated soon.

Franco Stays Loyal, No Spanish Civil War?

A long time ago I found a timeline on the alternate-history discussion forum in which General Francisco Franco, who led the fascist-allied Nationalists who overthrew the left-leaning but democratically-elected Spanish Republic in the 1930s, remains loyal to the Spanish Republic. Apparently he dithered about whether to join the planned coup attempt, much to the other conspirators' annoyance, and at one point warned the government the military was disloyal, but ended up joining the uprising.

Here's the timeline, which was written by a Spanish board-member and has all sorts of details an outsider wouldn't know. Here are some highlights:

*Sometimes pushing to get your way gets you the exact opposite response, something Emilio Mola really should have thought about when trying to get Franco to join up.

*Spanish society was heavily divided in the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War. Even though the coup that kicked off our history's war is pre-empted and squashed, there's a lot of political violence from both sides. 1934 saw a left-wing uprising in Spain that Franco defeated with extreme brutality; in this timeline the Spanish hard right makes a go of it in 1936 after the coup is squashed.

*Anarchism (the left-wing socialist sort) becomes a parliamentary party in the Spanish Republic. Although an anarchist political party seems like a bit of an oxymoron, it's not that difficult to push for certain political goals within a governmental framework. Anarchism was very strong in Spain, in particular Catalonia.

*Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during the early days of the war apparently planned to opportunistically seize the Balearic Islands, but found his Nationalist allies had seized them first. This time around the enmity between the Spanish Republic and the Italian fascist regime remains.

*Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky comes to live in Spain, much to Stalin's rage.

The timeline is long and very detailed, but it's very interesting. Check it out!

My New Military SF Novella Is Here!

This past Wednesday evening, my first original Kindle project in years (if you don't count the audio version of my horror story "I am the Wendigo," since that was a different edition of an older work) went live. Behold my science fiction novella Ten Davids, Two Goliaths, set in Lindsay Buroker's FALLEN EMPIRE universe.

Here's my Amazon blurb, which I wrote myself...

The Tri-Sun Alliance has been nibbling at the edges of the Sarellian Empire, attacking isolated patrols, supply convoys, and even civilian supporters of the regime. But now Alliance intelligence has learned of something worth gambling their limited combat power--a pair of Imperial escort cruisers on a training mission near an isolated world.

Helping command the attack is Lt. Geun Choi, a former Imperial fighter pilot disgraced by an act of mercy. Serving under him is Tamara Watson, another ex-Imperial with demons of her own. But whatever their pasts, the two must improvise or die when it turns out the intelligence that sent them on the mission wasn't complete and the carefully-planned ambush develops complications.

Taking place before pilot Alisa Marchenko met her future engineer Mica Coppervein and well before the Empire fell, this tale set in Lindsay Buroker's FALLEN EMPIRE universe explores the early days of the Great Rebellion. Fans of STAR WARS, FIREFLY, WING COMMANDER, and the tales of Honor Harrington will enjoy this adventure.

If you're into military sci-fi or space opera, or just want to see Billy Mitchell's theories on air-power vs. ships tested out IIIN SPAAACE, then you might like this. It's around 10,000 words long, so it won't take very long for you to read and enjoy. There's one small problem in that Kindle Worlds is for some reason limited to American (USA) readers only, but there is a way around that. Visit this link here for more.

This story (and some consulting work I did for Ms. Buroker) would not have happened if I weren't a regular listener to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast. So if you're looking for some advice on how to sell and market your work, check it out.

What If Stalin Had Survived His Stroke?

My self-ban from the alternate-history forum won't expire until the end of this week and I might re-ban so I can avoid unnecessary distractions from finishing and submitting Little People, Big Guns over the summer. However, I can still read the forums and I found something else you guys might appreciate...

Twilight of the Red Tsar

There's a book called Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar that compares the Communist absolute ruler of the Soviet Union with the Russian monarchs of old and I'm guessing that's where the user whose handle is Napoleon IV derived the title. The gist of it is that Stalin survived the stroke that killed him in our history.

That's not a good thing because he was apparently planning another Great Purge, this one with a particularly anti-Semitic focus. Given Russia's history with Jew-hating, there's the possibility of a second Holocaust within a decade of the first one.

Highlights of this timeline include the use of nuclear weapons, poison gas, and weaponized germs, rifts within the Communist movement (that usually followed Moscow's line), a Chinese messianic movement in the vein of peasant millenarian revolts that occurred in the dynastic past, and Richard Nixon. And there are a lot of allusions to the Book of Revelation in the chapter titles.

Enjoy!

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Starship Troopers (1997)

For the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we decided to watch the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers, an adaptation of the Robert Heinlein novel. Nick had intended for the podcast to be split up between himself and Daniel, who loved the movie, and a friend of ours and I, who didn't like what Verhoeven did with the movie. Sufficient to say, real-life intervened, but we still managed to get four people on-panel. You can listen to the podcast here.

And now for the review...

The Plot

In the 23rd Century, humans have begun colonizing other worlds under the auspices of the Federation, a rather strict government in which the right to vote and other rights are dependent on serving in the military. The humans encounter another race, the insect-like Arachnids, and soon war breaks out. A group of friends from Buenos Aires--Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), and Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris)--enlist in the military and soon join the fight.

The Good

*The movie has a great soundtrack. I was not allowed to see the movie in theaters when it came out, but I did get the soundtrack for Christmas that year. I particularly like Klendathu Drop.

*Although I complain mightily about Verhoeven mocking the book's ideas (at least some of my complaints might have been edited out at my request to avoid being too rant-y), the movie was far more faithful to the book than I remember. The novel starts out with Rico and his comrades dropping into battle before beginning his story in Buenos Aires and the film starts out with the rout on Klendathu before shifting "one year earlier" to Rico and his friends in high school. Also, Rico's dad is an egregious pill in the film, just like in the book, while his mother is more reasonable.

*There are some decent character arcs. Johnny begins the film as not really believing in the Federation's ideology of citizenship--his teacher even points out that he's repeating the textbook verbatim when he's asked what differentiates a citizen from a civilian--but by halfway through the film, when a character close to him dies, he's coming to believe in civic virtue, sacrifice, etc. wholeheartedly. Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon), who starts out the film a rival for Carmen's affections and is kind of an a-hole, informs her that Johnny actually did survive Klendathu, gets both of them to safety during the attack on Planet P, and goes out defiant before nothing less than a tractor-trailer-sized swarm-leading Brain Bug.

*Some characterization is done very subtly. Dizzy has a crush on Rico from the beginning, which is exposited via some long glances and rather catty, high-school-girl type behavior toward his then-girlfriend Carmen. And we see shades of Barney from How I Met Your Mother in Carl when he dances with Dizzy when Johnny rejects her. For a gay guy, Mr. Harris is really good at playing heterosexual womanizers for some reason.

*The film has some well-done battle sequences. Although a lot of the film is rather dull (more on that later), the fight scenes aren't.

*One of the great writing maxims is, "Show, don't tell," and Verhoeven illustrates the ugly side of the Federation without explicitly saying "THIS IS BAD! THIS IS BAD!" A criminal is tried and sentenced to death far too fast for a proper investigation to take place (and I say this as a supporter of the death penalty) with the execution being televised for good measure, the government is obviously spinning a natural disaster to justify a war, one character openly admits she's serving so she can get permission to have children, there's some incredibly goofy propaganda involving children, etc.

*Verhoeven does retain the multinational/multiracial character of the Federation from the novel. In the book the protagonist is Filipino, he has Turkish and even Japanese comrades (the book wasn't written long after WWII so this is especially significant), etc. With a downright alien foe like the Bugs, prejudice-prone humans have a more other-y "Other" to hate on and stuff like racism, sexism, etc. seem really petty. The film's main cast is entirely too Anglo for people who live in Buenos Aires, but there a fair number of background characters (fellow high-school students, various soldiers) who aren't white.

*Although in the book the Bugs had roughly the same technology humans had, including energy weapons, the Bug designs are generally pretty cool. I especially liked the warrior bugs with their coloration and sharp edges. Slap some laser cannons on them and they'd be perfect. I'm glad the television series Starship Troopers: Roughnecks retained the design, even if they skipped out on the "Bugs have guns" stuff too.

*Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in the post-WWII era and although the war saw women serving in military roles like the WACS, WAVES, etc. I don't think the idea of women in combat would have occurred to most Americans. Verhoeven depicts the sporty Dizzy Flores as a capable fighter and Carmen, despite not being a trained infantryman, can hold her own even while wounded. I'll give him points for that.

*The scene where the telepathic Carl prompts his ferret to harass his mother was pretty funny. So is a scene where Rico is handing Carmen dissected Bug organ after dissected Bug organ, oblivious to her growing disgust, until things get a little crazy.

*In one of the boot-camp scenes, one trainee questions why they're still training with knives. In the climax of the film, a knife comes in very handy. Chekov's Gun. :)

The Bad

*A lot of the film is really quite boring, especially the high-school and boot-camp sequences. I understand their importance for characterization, but they just were not that entertaining. And they took up a lot of the film.

*Xander is Carmen's flight instructor once she starts actually navigating capital ships, but he's around the same age as her and Johnny. He's explicitly depicted as being a football player for a rival school when Johnny and Carmen are seniors. If he were, say, the older brother of a friend of Carmen's who shipped out for the military some years before and is back in town on leave, that could explain Carmen's "man in uniform" attraction to him and how he's realistically that much more experienced.

*Carmen takes a wound that should either kill her or at least cripple the affected limb, but she's able to run around, fight, etc. not long afterward.

*It's generally a bad idea for a director who hates a book to do the adaptation. Verhoeven only read part of the novel and didn't like it. Don't take my word for it--check out the relevant Wikipedia section here. Verhoeven had his own vision--to satirize militarism, right-wing politics, etc--from the beginning and only shoved Starship Troopers in after pre-production began. He didn't like the message of the novel and deliberately mocked it by associating it with fascism, aggression, etc.

(No fascist book would pity "the poor bloody infantry" who are all that stand between home and "war's desolation" the way Heinlein's novel does. A fascist book would glorify death in battle, and the book does not. Heinlein and Verhoeven would agree that war is awful, but Heinlein would recognize that it's necessary sometimes and Verhoeven likely wouldn't. I can understand why Verhoeven would see all sides in a war as morally the same--he grew up during WWII seeing Dutch civilians killed by Allied air strikes against occupying German forces--but he had to totally warp Heinlein's Federation into a bunch of Nazis and then make them the aggressors against the Bugs in order for this to work.)

For my left-wing readers, I imagine if I produced a film adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale depicting the Republic of Gilead as a Christian utopia in which women are happy to be at home and out of the rat race, various minority groups are better off "in their place," the persecuted Quakers are dangerously naive idiots, and the Baptist guerrillas in the Appalachians and the "Libertheos" (I'm guessing some relation to Liberation Theology) fighting the regime are murderous war criminals who aren't really Christian at all. Fans would justifiably howl. That's how fans of Starship Troopers feel when faced with this "adaptation."

(For the record, I actually liked THMT, even though the idea that the U.S. military would overthrow the government to install a Christo-Taliban regime in which women are forbidden from reading and writing is ridiculous. It's well-written and far more nuanced than I'd expected when I started reading it. I still wouldn't be the best director for it, even if I wouldn't deliberately do a hatchet-job the way Verhoeven did.)

We need to move on, but I'll leave you with this criticism of the film and its differences from the book. And if you want a more overtly antiwar military sci-fi novel, check out Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Starship Troopers is the better book, but TFW has much better characterization. I've got a spoiler-iffic review of TFW here.

*Per Verhoeven's hatchet-job, the History and Moral Philosophy class depicts the notion of voting equating to force, the idea that "violence never solves anything" as naive at best, etc. in the most vicious, bloodthirsty light possible. Funny, I remember violence solving the problem of Nazism very well, and only the most ardent "violence is wrong no matter what" pacifists would disagree with me there.

Furthermore, as has been pointed out, the boot-camp sequences are full of needless sadism--in the book, for example, when someone wonders why they're still training with knives, the sergeant explains the appropriate levels of military force for different situations instead of pinning the recruit's hand to the wall with a knife. And Johnny is flogged for something completely different in the book, not for getting a soldier under his command killed in a highly questionable live-fire exercise. The scene where Sergeant Zim breaks a soldier's arm for challenging him is much uglier than in the book--in the novel, Zim breaks his arm in the process of beating him, but in the film, Zim puts him on the ground and then breaks his arm to make a point.

*The book was notable for introducing the trope of powered armor into science fiction, but there isn't any. People are wearing what look like SWAT gear and small arms and trying to beat an enemy with inexhaustible numbers by attrition. There's air support in one scene, but no artillery or tanks. Seriously, the Federation's military tactics and equipment really suck, and this is a society that has really cool prosthetic limbs for Michael Ironside. The book depicted initial assault on Klendathu as a disaster, but it didn't fail for lack of proper equipment on the soldiers' part.

The Verdict

Daniel makes a good case that this is a great satire that was ahead of its time. However, I don't like how Verhoeven deliberately mocked the source material and a lot of the movie just isn't that entertaining. See it once. 5.5 out of 10.

Two New Cool Alternate Timelines For You...

I'm still self-banned from the alternate-history forum until sometime in June at least, and I might re-up said ban until the end of the summer at least in order to focus on finishing Little People, Big Guns over the summer (the small press I've been in contact with says 30,000 words max). However, I do drop in from time to time just to read and found a couple cool ideas.

*Here's the first one, Twilight of the Valkyries. This is a super-detailed account of what have happened if the July 20 plot had successfully killed Adolf Hitler. A former member of the site (he got banned, although I can't remember why) proposed that the ultimate beneficiary of the plot would not have been the Schwarze Kapelle anti-Hitler conspiracy within the military but the ambitious Panzer commander Heinz Guderian, who had a substantial force of tank trainees nearby and could crush the SS and Home Army both. The timeline's creator has clearly done his (or her, although almost all site members are male) research. There are hints that he's using the "Salt the Earth" scenario I posted about earlier as a model--the French Communist resistance leaders in Paris are watching the inter-German fighting eagerly.

I'm using a Guderian-rides-Valkyrie-plot-to-power scenario as the basis for a dieselpunk world I'm fiddling with, so I'm definitely watching this one eagerly.

*This is a more obscure one, based on a little-known mutiny by the Force Publique against King Leopold's rule in the Congo. It's called Mameluke Congo and postulates that if the mutineers had a single charismatic leader, they might have been able to eject Leopold's regime from the Congo completely. It turns out the Force Publique in this period was ludicrously heavily armed and Soverihn makes the case they could maintain control of the entire ex-colony and deter outside intervention, especially if the European Great Powers are all trying to keep others from taking the Congo rather than uniting to crush a challenge to white power in Africa.

(In case you're wondering, the Mamelukes were a slave military caste that ultimately took control of Egypt. The Force Publique in this scenario would adopt a sort of collective identity of their own that would transcend the tribes from which they'd been recruited.)

At present the timeline goes all the way into a delayed WWI in which the Congo is allied to the Central Powers and proceeds to ravage the Allies' African colonies--until the Royal Navy swoops in and cuts off their trade. It's not clear at this point whether the Congolese will survive the wider war, even though it does look like the Central Powers are winning.

"Salt The Earth," Or How The Valkyrie Junta Could Undermine American-Soviet Alliance

On the Facebook alternate history group this morning, someone posted a question about how World War II could end with Germany retaining at least some territorial gains made under Hitler--think Austria (the most morally defensible, considering this), the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor, etc. Some people thought that was basically impossible, while others posted various scenarios about the German Resistance toppling Hitler, either in 1943 (when Germany is still winning major battles) or 1944 (when the Nazis are clearly closing the war). The latter coup attempt, for the record, is the subject of the movie Valkyrie.

To contribute to the discussion, I posted a scenario I found on the alternate history forum I've been a member of since high school (that I've had myself blocked from posting on until June due to real-life obligations) entitled "Salt The Earth."

The gist of the scenario is that the military branch of the German Resistance (the only ones that had a realistic chance of actually toppling the Nazis) manages to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis. The timing of the plot doesn't seem important--supposedly the 1943 plot would also take out other top Nazis and Hitler's cronies in the military, allowing for an easier seizure of power, while in 1944 the war is obviously lost and so there's less risk of a "stab-in-the-back" myth developing afterward.

The war ends (in Europe at least) and it's all sunshine and rainbows, right? Wrong. If the 1944 coup attempt succeeds, the US, Britain, and the Soviets have all agreed the war will go on until unconditional surrender and the policy has been in place for some time. There will be no negotiated peace, no chance for Germany to rearm and do it again in another generation. And the Soviets, given the really awful stuff that the Germans did (and what they wanted to do), are going to be absolutely out for blood.

In 1944, Germany is already clearly losing, with Operation Bagration absolutely wrecking the German army in the East (80% of the German army was defeated by the Soviets) and Anglo-American-French forces already advancing in Western Europe. Even if the Germans go totally defensive and avoid screw-ups like the Falaise Pocket, the Battle of the Bulge, etc., the sheer power of the Red Army and the coming of the atomic bomb (originally intended for use against the Germans) means that a purely military solution won't save Germany. 1943 is more favorable, but the odds are still rapidly growing against Germany and some version of the following solution might still have to be put in place.

So if the Valkyrie junta wants some kind of negotiated peace, especially a peace that leaves them with any of Hitler's gains, they're going to have to earn it. And the "Salt the Earth" scenario explains how:

*Pull back to more defensible positions. River lines like the Rhine in the west or the Alps in Italy. Put as much of Germany's remaining fighting power in the East. That's something any post-Hitler junta with half a brain would do if the Allies aren't going to negotiate. Better to be occupied by the US and Britain than the totalitarian Soviets who (as I have already pointed out) also have very, very legitimate reasons to be vengeful.

Now comes the clever parts...

*Allow the Polish Home Army to take control of much of Poland, which would put the Soviets in a position where in order to take Poland for Communism they would have to openly attack the Polish government-no-longer-in-exile. In real life the Soviets fought alongside the Home Army and then betrayed them and deliberately allowed the Germans to crush the Warsaw Uprising.

(Some have made the case the Soviets at this point were not capable of helping the Home Army in Warsaw, but that doesn't explain why the Soviets forcibly prevented American aircraft based in the USSR from dropping supplies to the Home Army, which Thomas Fleming writes extensively about in The New Dealers' War. If you don't want to read a book with an obvious ax to grind against much of Roosevelt's administration if not Roosevelt himself, the Wikipedia article has both sides.)

In this scenario, the Soviets would either have to respect the independence of Poland or openly make war upon a state that is theoretically their ally that is fulfilling one of Britain's original war aims (preserve the independence of Poland), which would be much more difficult to cover up.

*Deliberately arm Communist resistance movements in non-Communist countries. Imagine the problems that would happen if the Communist French Resistance took control of Paris before Charles De Gaulle. Ugliest and sneakiest of them all would be putting them in charge of prisons full of anti-Communist resistance members whom they might be tempted to murder. Even if Stalin orders them not to, all it might take to generate a massive PR problem is one or two incidents.

Of course, the leadership of the Big Three is going to do their best to squash this. Roosevelt insisted the Katyn Massacre had been perpetrated by the Nazis, not the Soviets, and hid the evidence gathered by the Polish government-in-exile during the war. The U.S. had press controls during WWII; although a lot of it was based on the presumption of reporter patriotism, there was still an Office of Censorship. Britain had press censorship as well. Although this was focused on keeping the enemy from finding out about military movements ("loose lips sink ships"), I could easily imagine the government attempting to cover up anything that could threaten the alliance with Stalin. And the Soviet people aren't going to know anything Stalin doesn't want them to know.

However, though absolute tyrant like Stalin doesn't have the PR concerns of a democratic leader, he was also ragingly paranoid. Convincing him the Western Allies had betrayed him is quite plausible, even if a wartime American public fed propaganda like Mission to Moscow still believes in "Uncle Joe." If the Valkyrie crew can set Stalin against the West, that alone is a significant improvement over their position even if they can't successfully turn U.S. or British public opinion against Stalin.

Even if the gambit ultimately fails to significantly change the outcome of the war, the post-war division of Europe, etc., once the soldiers start returning and spreading word of stuff that had been kept from the U.S. public, there could be political hell to pay. The Democrats might never get the Polish-American community's vote back if FDR's government successfully covered up a betrayal of the Poles far more blatant and with a much higher body count than in our history, only for the cat to get out of the bag in 1946. Depending on how things shake out in Italy, France, and Greece, that's more voting blocs whose inclinations might be different than in our history, even temporarily.

Redgum, Or More Aussie Rock Courtesy of YouTube

Here're another couple of cool songs from Australia that I found via YouTube. The first is "I Was Only Nineteen," by Redgum.

I'd known that there were Australian soldiers who'd fought beside Americans in Vietnam since I read Peter F. Hamilton's second Reality Dysfunction novel in high school. That one featured a dead Australian Vietnam veteran possessing a living convict in the distant future.

(It's a long story.)

Something notable about this song is that the Australian protagonist has an experience very similar to that associated with American Vietnam veterans (and veterans in general, although Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder became more well-known in the Vietnam generation). He can't sleep at night due to the nightmares, the news helicopter frightens him, and "the rash that comes and goes" might be caused by Agent Orange.

And thanks to "I Was Only Nineteen," I found "Poor Ned," which is about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

The song conflates Kelly with the Eureka Rebellion ("hoist the flag of stars"), in which a bunch of Australian gold miners rebelled against the unpleasant British colonial government. Imagine the Battle of Bunker Hill, only if the Patriots got crushed immediately after inflicting little damage on the enemy but were found innocent of any crime due to jury nullification and ended up getting into elected into the government.

Eureka was many years before Ned Kelly, but Kelly did release a manifesto denouncing the government and calling for justice for the Australian poor. The song lyrics tie in heavily with the manifesto, including defending his shooting of some police (he claims self-defense) and claiming mistreatment of his family by the police. I haven't read Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits, but I do know what a "social bandit" is and Kelly seems to fit the description.

Independent French Equatorial Africa After Limited Nazi Victory?

Here's another goodie from the alternate-history forum. The member whose handle is Jonathan_Edelstein came up with the idea that in the event of a German-British peace early in WWII (his idea is that Hitler dies in 1941 before the invasion of the Soviet Union and his successors decide to postpone the plan to finish Britain first), not all of France's colonies would submit to the Vichy regime even if it was recognized as the legitimate government of France as part of a compromise peace.

In particular, he suggested French Equatorial Africa might rebel against the new government and ally with the Free French. The basis for this is that the governor of French Equatorial Africa was Félix Éboué, the only black French colonial governor in the French Empire at the time and possibly the only black colonial governor anywhere, ever. Éboué decides he has no future under Vichy and rebels using Chadian troops, gambling on Vichy France's lack of a navy to avoid immediate invasion.

According to Edelstein, Éboué's government wouldn't be a fully decolonized state, but a sort of paternalistic limited-franchise regime with a lot of French government officials and a strong influence by the Catholic Church. He also suggested the different factions within the state could be at odds with each other, including the Catholic civilian government on the coast, the Muslim Chadian soldiery, etc.

The user whose handle is Pikers3 said he doubted it would last long. In order to maintain its legitimacy, the Vichy regime would have to claim all of France's colonies and could not tolerate a rival French state anywhere. With Britain at peace with Germany and (Vichy) France, the Germans and what remains of the loyalist French navy will invade Éboué's state (possibly with the support of Franco, who is no longer deterred by the threat of British attack) and quickly take control. There might be Free French troubles in the interior, but that'd be it. He said historians would remember this as the last gasp of the Free French.

However, there is a way around this. Depending on how long it takes until Britain is brought to the table, the German and Vichy surface navies could be totally wrecked in the meantime. The German fleet took heavy losses invading Norway and the British waged war against the Vichy regime as a co-belligerent of the Nazis, including at one point attacking and sinking much of the French navy lest the Nazis get it. If the Germans and the Vichy allies bring the British to the table by fighting a war of attrition at sea and in the Middle East and North Africa, they might have no surface navy left by the time this is done.

In that case, although the Germans could blockade French Equatorial Africa's ports with submarines, no surface navy means no immediate invasion of FEA. FEA could putter along for years as some kind of blockaded unrecognized state in the vein of Rhodesia.

I'll send this to Jonathan_Edelstein and see what he thinks...

An Insurgency in BABYLON FIVE?

I met pulp author Van Allen Plexico at DragonCon a couple years ago and we're friends on Facebook. Earlier today, he posted this article, "The 'Missing Insurgency' of Babylon Five's Final Seasons."

The gist of it is that Plexico expected evil Earth leader Morgan Clark to have more popular support among the Earth Alliance population. His regime was not in power long and humans who didn't openly challenge the regime were likely left alone. Meanwhile, rebel commander John Sheridan, due to his alliance with the Minbari (who had nearly eviscerated the human race a little over a decade before) would perfectly fulfill Clark's propaganda against aliens and their allies. Given how Clark had taken control of Earth's media outlets, he had years to fill Earth's population's collective heads with half-truths if not outright lies about Sheridan and friends. Consequently, Sheridan and the White Stars should have faced a lengthy postwar insurgency even after their victory in the Earth Alliance Civil War.

I suggested that Clark's last-minute "Scorched Earth" attempt to turn the planet's defenses against the population would have been enough to absolutely discredit Clark, his regime, and anything associated with it. After all, shooting yourself and trying to take all of Earth's people down with you has a way of making everybody hate you. Furthermore, although anti-interventionists often claim that people will rally around a dictator against a foreign threat no matter how bad they are, the Italians in WWII greeted Allied troops as liberators even before Mussolini fell and the Germans came in en masse.

Plexico's response was that Mussolini had been misgoverning Italy for years and was in the process of losing a long war against the Allies, in contrast to Clark's regime that was only in power for around three. Furthermore, Clarkist die-hards could claim "Scorched Earth" was propaganda by Sheridan's allies. Considering how it took a lengthy space battle to neutralize Earth's orbital weapons, it does seem plausible that pro-alien traitor would claim Clark had intended to massacre his own population when his real goal was to cripple Earth's defenses for his alien masters.

I wasn't really familiar with Babylon Five even though I did watch Babylon Five: In the Beginning on television once and I remember the episode in which Sheridan's rebels raced against time to stop Earth's defense platforms from firing. I did a bit of reading and found that the worst of Clark's atrocities (i.e. mass killing, as opposed to just dissolving the elected government) took place off-Earth. This would explain why so many Earth warships, which would have faced a choice of committing war crimes or mutiny, defected to Sheridan's rebellion. However, with his control of the media, Clark could have deceived the people on Earth itself about the nature of his military activities abroad and the nature of the uprising. Consequently, even though most of the Earth Alliance would view Sheridan and company as heroes, there might be a large number of people on Earth who would think otherwise. Those people could be a problem later on.

A possible model for how this could have happened is Iraq in our history. The insurgency could consist of die-hard Clark supporters analogous to the Baathists, open followers of the Shadows analogous to Islamists (Clark was in league with them, but given his regime's xenophobia, I imagine this was kept quiet), and, for a touch of moral grayness, "Earth nationalist" rebels who disavow the horrors of Clark's regime but think Sheridan, the Interstellar Alliance, etc. are a subtle alien takeover of Earth.

You wouldn't even really need that many--a small crew of Clarkist fanatics or those still devoted to the Shadows even after they left the galaxy (think the human equivalent of the Drakh) could stir up trouble in hopes of provoking a crackdown by Sheridan's human troops or (even better) alien allies, which would vindicate them in the eyes of the people and attract more support. Heck, if the show wanted a sympathetic human foe, someone who means well but has been deceived by evil people and/or aliens (like the Shadows), simply wants to pull the Earth Alliance out of the Interstellar Alliance due to isolationism and lack of a Shadow threat, or was just really traumatized by service in the war with the Minbari and isn't thinking straight would work. It doesn't have to be a major plot arc--maybe a one-off episode where a bunch of PTSD-addled veterans of the Earth-Minbari War try to assassinate Sheridan or commit some kind of outrage on Babylon Five itself.

Thing is, Babylon Five ran from 1994 to 1998. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (especially the latter) were well into the future. Even the Kosovo War, which featured an Albanian insurgency that deliberately provoked the government to attack civilians, a thuggish Yugoslav government all too willing to be thuggish, and an international intervention that resulted in vast numbers of Serb and Romani (Gypsy) civilians fleeing possible Albanian reprisal, was still in the future. Although I could credit B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski with enough creativity to potentially come up with this on his own, the real-life incidents that would inspire such episodes and resonate with the viewer (think about how the Iraqi occupation inspired much of the New Caprica arc in Battlestar Galactica) had not happened yet.

It could still be a pretty cool story though.